


cuckoo and nightingale

by ATMachine (orphan_account)



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Daeron is not nice, Gang Rape, Gen, Incest, Incestuous Rape/Non-con, Melkor isn't either, Sibling Incest, attempted honor killing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 14:27:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13953549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/ATMachine
Summary: Many secrets lie hid beneath the rime of Angband’s snows.





	1. he who shines in darkness

O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,

Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart

Absent thee from felicity a while,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

To tell my story.

\-- Shakespeare, _Hamlet_ , Act V, Scene II

 

'Thuringwethil I am, who cast a shadow o'er the face aghast of the sallow moon in the doomed land of shivering Beleriand.'

'Liar art thou, who shalt not weave deceit before mine eyes. Now leave thy form and raiment false, and stand revealed, and delivered to my hand!'

_\-- The Lay of Leithian_ , canto XIII

 

 

 

He wove the spell, and her garments fell away: her bat-fell disguise, her cloak of night, her blue mantle and white gown.

She stood naked before Morgoth Bauglir, the Great Enemy, the self-proclaimed King of Arda.

She thought for a moment about covering herself with her arms, but decided not to. She needed to keep a cool head, needed to have confidence in the face of mortal danger, though it was a confidence she did not feel.

Luthien kept her arms at her sides, and her head cast down in a gesture of modesty, and stepped forward to speak with the Enemy of Arda.

“Indeed you have seen truly, lord,” she said. _Lord?_ She cast aside the revulsion at giving such a title to such a loathsome being. “I am Leivunit, a wandering minstrel and troubadour. In my wanderings I have heard glimpses of the splendor and majesty of Morgoth’s court; for troubadours learn to separate truth from falsehood in their verse, and it was plain to me how false were most of the tales spun by Elvish makers.

“I yearned to see such majesty for myself, but I knew that few of the Eldar would take me there of their own will, nor consort with one who wished to journey here. Thus did I disguise myself in a bat-fell, and with a loyal companion in similar guise come to seek thee out, O King.”

Morgoth roared with laughter. It was a deep, frightening sound, like the blowing of unearthly horns by some strange hunting party far beneath the surface of the world. “So, _Luthien_ —"

At the mention of her name she started, and for the first time looked the King of Hell full in the face.

His skin was black, black as soot. He sat naked upon a throne of black iron, a massive flaccid cock visible between his legs. His left leg had been severed below the knee, and replaced with a prosthesis, made like his throne of black iron; evidently the wound dealt by Fingolfin was more severe than the stories made tell.

His chest was covered in thick black hair, and a long black beard fell from his face. His nose was flat and goatish, his teeth sharp and yellowed between thin dark lips. Pointed goat-like ears protruded at the sides of his head, and two tall horns, black and ribbed, extended from his skull.

Around his head was bound the three-pronged Iron Crown, blazing with the blue-white radiance of the three Silmarils entrapped within.

But nothing had prepared her for his eyes.

They burned with the orange-red heat of embers, and what should have been the whites was dark in colour. But strangest of all were his pupils, three in number in each eye. They glared at her with hatred – and desire.

Luthien fought down the rising bile in her throat.

“So, Luthien – a liar like all Elves and Men!”

Morgoth laughed again, and the walls of the throne room shook. Beneath the seat of Morgoth’s throne, Beren cowered and kept his eyes down, knowing how unlikely this was to end well for either of them. Luthien forced herself to keep her gaze level with Morgoth’s, her violet eyes challenging his strange unearthly embers.

“I can scarce believe that one such as thee would have come to me for the reasons thou claimest. Growing up in the cloistered halls of Thingol, one is hardly likely to have heard such tales. Not fit for the ears of delicate maidens, I fancy.”

He put a hand to his bearded chin in thought. “And yet… and yet I know there is something within thee that burns with a desire for freedom. The very same desire that set my lieutenant Sauron on her course to being my right hand. Yes, I will not hide it from thee; thou didst guess aright the true nature of her soul, when thou threwest down the walls of her tower.”

Luthien trembled. How did Morgoth know so soon of how she had cast down the walls of Sauron’s fortress, stripped the Lord of Werewolves first of wolf-hame and then of accustomed male disguise? And what else did he know of her doings – of her meetings with Beren in her father’s forests, when she was innocent of what men and maids did together; or her captivity in Nargothrond, where she lost her maidenhead; or the twin babes, one fair and one dark, that she brought to birth in the wilderness afterward, and had Huan the hound carry back to their fathers?

“Ah… thou wonderest how I know these things. I see many things afar off, and thus I know many things which it is needful for me to know; and others I learn purely for my whim. I know that thou, for instance, hast on a time run through the woods of Doriath in the skin of a white hart – reveling in the animal’s speed and grace, the power of its sharp antlers to dispute with foes, the feel of its bollocks slapping against its undersides.”

At this Luthien blushed. Again, she wondered how Morgoth could know of this. Even her own father had not known when she and her brother Daeron stole deer-skins from the vaults of the Thousand Caves and cavorted in the woods. In their playing she had taken a wound in her side from Daeron’s deer-antlers, and he treated her wound with herbs and poultices, rather than run to their father and betray their secret. She still bore the scar.

“Well… in time shalt thou learn those secrets, fair one, if thou abidest here. And abide here thou shalt, for I am minded to keep thee beside me as a servant. Thou art possessed of great power, Luthien, and in time thou mightest be equal even to Sauron my chief lieutenant: a source of counsel in my plans of conquest, and a chieftain in my wars against the rebellious Elves and Men, who refuse to acknowledge my rightful rule.”

Morgoth’s massive arms gripped the sides of his throne, and he began slowly, with evident pain, with muscles atrophied by long disuse, to heave himself up.

“But first…. First thou must be tamed, my sweet nightingale.”

Her blood ran cold hearing Beren’s nickname for her fall from Morgoth’s lips.

“Do you know… what they called me in Aman?” He paused for breath as he pushed himself upright. “Melkor. He Who Arises… In Might. Yet few… have ever asked… why that of all my names was first to be bestowed.”

At last Morgoth raised himself up to his full height. He was easily twice as tall as she, nearly three times so, and for the first time she noticed a tail dangling behind his legs, companion to the massive cock in front. His prick was as long as her arm. She wondered if he used shape-changing to be able to fit it into other beings. But no, that was impossible, he couldn’t change shape anymore, the stories said—

_“BEHOLD MY MIGHT!”_

And suddenly, Morgoth’s soot-coloured skin blazed with a light that made the glow of the Silmarils seem like moth-holes in a white tapestry.

It was the last thing Luthien ever saw.

 

He took her then, him and forty of his Orc-chieftains; she learned the hard way that Morgoth did indeed still possess the power of shape-changing in some degree.

They used every orifice they could – even the sockets where her eyes had melted out of her head. The ones that made her suck their cocks took particular delight in pissing down her throat afterwards.

Their blows rained down like water, with fist and club and whip. Blood and piss, alcohol and semen, collected on her skin, so unusually pallid even for an Elf, and in her hair, still cropped short after she grew it out with magic, and made of its severed strands a rope to escape her father’s prison.

How ironic, she thought – Thingol’s desire to protect his daughter from the world had only fuelled the determination that had led her here. To this Hell. To this fucking.

It seemed like an eternity before the drunken revelry was over, and Morgoth and his thanes fell asleep. By the time they did, the area between her legs felt like a blazing fire.

Wearily, painfully, she groped her way to the base of Morgoth’s throne and roused Beren. He had covered his face and shut his eyes to avoid seeing what happened, when first she was stripped; eventually, with no harm offered to him as Morgoth’s lust focused on Luthien, he had fallen asleep.

He saw her ruined eye sockets, saw the teeth missing from her jaw and the fluids leaking from between her legs, and hot tears fell down his cheeks. His arms wrapped around her naked back, bleeding from the lashes of an Orc-whip, and he held her in a warm and gentle hug that she did not refuse.

There, amid the dark, dank, foul throne room of the Enemy of Arda, the lovers embraced.

Then they set to work.


	2. white as snow, red as blood

From its scabbard at his side Beren drew his Elvish knife – taken from Curufin, small recompense for his rape of Luthien – and slowly, carefully, he climbed up the sleeping form of Morgoth, passed out upon his throne, weary with drink and the sating of his lust.

At last Beren found a steady position on the Dark Lord’s right shoulder, and began to hack at the Silmarils so long emprisoned in the Iron Crown.

The first came out easily, and Beren tossed it to the ground below.

The second came with more difficulty, but eventually Beren wrested it from its socket.

When Beren tried for the third, farthest away, the knife snapped, and its shard struck Morgoth’s cheek. The Dark Lord’s sleeping form stirred; still in slumber, the King of Hell reached up with his left hand to brush the irritation from his face, as a man might brush aside a fly that bites him in the night.

Though Morgoth did not wake, yet his body quivered beneath Beren’s feet, and Beren knew that further efforts to release the third Silmaril would mean their deaths.

Quickly he clambered down Morgoth’s still form once more. Then he and Luthien, each bearing a Silmaril, ran pell-mell for the exits and the light of day.

But in her haste Luthien had forgotten her clothing: her tattered dress and mantle, her hideous bat-fell disguise, and her magical cloak of night.

 

The wolf, Carcharoth, confronted them on the great drawbridge at the gates of Angband. Before them were the maws of the wolf, and behind them the gates of Hell; on either side below them was a river of bubbling lime.

Beren sought to daunt Carcharoth with the light of the Silmaril, to force the beast back and make way for them to pass. But Carcharoth, who had seen the light of Morgoth’s dark radiance and not been harmed, was not daunted, and consumed the shining orb held in front of him, hand and all.

For Morgoth had bred Carcharoth in the hope that one day this evil wolf would eat the Sun and Moon themselves, and gave the beast therefore a hunger for all bright and radiant orbs; but his hope was cheated, and the Light sustained, for in eating the Silmaril Carcharoth wove his own doom.

The heat of the Silmaril in the wolf’s innards was like nothing the creature had ever known; it howled in pain, and flung itself back into its lair at the end of the drawbridge. Swiftly Beren and Luthien passed over the bridge, gaining the other side and returning to the world of Elves and Men.

Here Huan the hound joined them, for they had been constrained to leave him at the gates of Angband, lest the great dog’s hatred of all Orcs bring him to frenzy and betray their disguise.

But in their condition – the one maimed, the other blinded and ravished – they could not go far. Surely, they thought, it would not be long before Morgoth’s pursuers caught up with them, and they were cast forever back into that dark abyss.

Then the Eagles came.

 

Thus did Beren Erchamion, the One-Handed, lay a Silmaril in the hand of Thingol, King of Doriath, and win Luthien Tinuviel to wife.

A hand of silver was fashioned for Beren, and teeth of silver likewise to fill the gaps in Luthien’s smile; and their wedding was joyous, though Luthien’s stomach already swelled with child.

But the tale does not end there: for in the spring Carcharoth, maddened by the undying pain in his belly, went forth into Middle-earth, and ravened against all that lived therein, devouring Elves and Men and Dwarves that stood in his wake.

Thus Thingol called for a great hunt, to destroy this creature whose insatiable hunger and unending pain threatened the lives of all it came near; and Beren joined in it, and Huan the hound, and Mablung and Damrod, hunters to the king.

The hunt was a sad one: for Carcharoth took Beren unawares, and gelded him. Huan seeing this charged at Carcharoth, and the twain fought so fiercely that each received his mortal wounds thereby.

Beren, too, died, for he had lost too much blood; yet before he perished, at Huan’s urging the carcase of Carcharoth was cut open, and there inside was the Silmaril, and Beren’s hand, yet incorrupt. There too were two great star sapphires in cabochon, gems of Dwarven craft which the wolf consumed when Morgoth sent him against the Dwarves of Mount Gram.

Mablung was first to pick up the Silmaril, and though Beren’s severed hand that held it was unblemished, yet the jewel burnt Mablung’s hand when he took it, so that never after could he use his right hand again, and was forced to rely on his left. Thus did Mablung receive the name “the Heavy-Handed.” For the Silmarils do not suffer any to touch them who have not earned the right to do so.

“O King,” said Beren to Thingol, “I die now, and commend to you this second Silmaril delivered from the crown of Morgoth. Dear Luthien, take these sapphires from the wolf’s belly, and wear them in remembrance of me. I shall love thee forever. Farewell!”

Thus Beren died, and was afterwards buried with the hand that Carcharoth had bitten off. Huan, too, was laid in a grave nearby; but the body of Carcharoth was burnt, and its ashes scattered to the winds.

 

The Wise say that Luthien died indeed, and journeyed to Mandos in spirit form to plead for the release of Beren; but the true account as recorded by Master Elrond, and told to none outside his family, runs thus.

Luthien was delivered of children once more; twins, a girl and a boy, named Elwing and Dior, with milk-white skin and snow-white hair. The latter was so fair of face and so precocious that none who knew the truth of his mother’s tale doubted him to be the son of Morgoth Bauglir. As for Elwing… none could say for certain whether it was Morgoth or Beren whose seed had brought her forth in Luthien’s womb.

In after years the genealogies were confused, making Elwing into the daughter of Dior rather than his sister; and when Elwing’s children Elrond and Elros went missing for a brief time after the fall of Sirion and the sack of the Havens there, the Wise believed this to have been conflated by mistake with the sack of Doriath by the sons of Fëanor. They invented new names for the two boys, and called them the children of Dior, who were perforce never found. But this gets ahead of the tale.

When her babes proved healthy, Luthien set off across the Helcaraxë, the scars on her back hidden under heavy furs and winter garments; but the icy crossing took its toll, and by the time she reached Valinor she was utterly naked.

Her leg ached with cold during the crossing, as though knives of ice were plunged into her flesh. She had broken it long ago in her fall from Thingol’s treehouse prison, when she’d chosen to leave some hair on her head rather than make a rope of full length and greet her Beren bald.

She paid for that choice soon after, when, running painfully on a broken leg, she had been captured by Celegorm and Curufin, who first taught her the cruelty that men can do to women. Yet she was grateful to them, in a fashion. For without that knowledge, she would never have endured what was necessary to retrieve the Silmarils and win Beren’s hand.

Of the sights of Valinor and the splendor of the Gods Luthien saw nothing; for she was blind.

 

At last Luthien came to the halls of Mandos still living, to plead for the life of her lover.

She sang for Mandos a song of beauty, love, and tragedy, such as he had never heard before; and, as he had never been moved before, he was moved now to deal with her.

Mandos would grant the resurrection of her beloved Beren. But at a price.

His price was this: Luthien Tinuviel must give him her heart, as a memento, that whenever he gazed upon it he would remember her song.

Luthien agreed.

But she reminded Mandos that she gave up only her heart thereby, and not her life.

Thus, by the magic of Mandos, did the Silmaril stolen from Morgoth’s crown through so much pain, and retrieved from the innards of Carcharoth at the cost of Beren’s life, replace the beating heart in the breast of Luthien Tinuviel.

And thus was Beren Erchamion, a Man who had died in the way of Men, resurrected, and set beyond the grasp of Death in the way of Men for ever.


	3. so blossom then, Eldarin blood

When they had returned to Middle-earth, Luthien put the star sapphires retrieved from Carcharoth’s belly into her eye sockets; she wore them as Beren had bidden her, but in joy rather than sorrow. The shining jewels added to her aura of strangeness, for already her complexion was white as literal snow, paler by far than any Elf of pure Eldarin blood.

And, when Glaurung the worm was slain and the gold of Nargothrond brought to his halls in spite by Hurin the wanderer, Thingol sent to the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost for artificers, who could fashion a fit housing for the wonder and splendor of the Silmaril.

It seemed only just that the gold of Nargothrond, whose uncrowned rulers had been first to violate Luthien, would now adorn the token of her triumph against the Great Enemy and his allies.

With the companies of Dwarves came a welcome guest: for Daeron Luthien’s brother had been lost, soon after her disappearance, searching for her by treacherous byways in the woods. All had thought him dead, or made a thrall of Morgoth; but his life had been saved by the Dwarves, and he had taken to helping them in their craft, and become an artisan of no mean skill.

Indeed, he was now so much at home among the Dwarves that he had taken a new name: he was no longer Daeron, he said to his kin in the Thousand Caves, but Ufedhin, the Ally from Afar.

 

Thingol forbade the Dwarves to leave his halls with the gold, to shape it in their own workshops amidst their own familiar tools; but rather he forced them to labour in small dank chambers in the Thousand Caves, with crude and unfamiliar tools, and when all was done he paid them a pittance for their efforts.

But at the end of it the Nauglamir, the Necklace of the Dwarves, was forged, and Thingol in his pride wore it always, as a symbol of his might and majesty. The Silmaril burned within its golden cage, and Thingol now forbore to touch it; but he had no idea of the doom he had wrought with the forging of the necklace.

From Luthien his sister, Ufedhin had learned the truth of her time with Morgoth, and rather than sympathise with all she had gone through, he burned with shame that the Jewels of Fëanor should have been acquired in such a lewd and debased way.

His sister was a common strumpet, a whore who spread her legs for the Enemy of Arda and bore his spawn, in order to spare the life of her wretched human paramour.

And his father, the King of Doriath, looked on her with love, and deemed her a hero for all she had been through. To say nothing of how shamefully he had treated the Dwarves, who had saved Ufedhin from death in the forest.

It would not end here, he vowed to himself.

They would pay with their blood.

 

And so it was that, at Daeron’s urging, Thingol and Luthien rode with him on a hunt: alone, for Beren was elsewhere gathering fuel and stores for the onset of winter.

It ended in tragedy; for a company of Dwarves, their minds full of malice, had been brought through the Girdle of Melian by Ufedhin, against whom his mother’s magic of protection was powerless. They fell upon the hunting party, and hewed off Thingol’s head, and took the Nauglamir from his lifeless breast. Thus were the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost revenged for the slights the Elf-king had inflicted on them.

Luthien they took prisoner. Ufedhin planned to kill her, when they had returned to the Dwarf-kingdoms, to avenge the stain she had cast upon the honour of the Eldar – but first, he and his Dwarves would cleanse her womb of the Dark Lord’s seed, by filling it with their own.

It was the worst of all the rapes Luthien had suffered. Celegorm and Curufin, and that drunken sot Orodreth, she had known for rogues and blackguards; she had endured the touch of Morgoth and his Orc-thanes for the sake of Beren whom she loved.

But she had also loved Daeron, though in a different way, and had not looked for such villainy from her brother, with whom she had stolen through the woods clad in harts’ fells long ago.

 

In the Thousand Caves, Melian knew what had happened to her husband, and fled from there, and sought out Beren to give him the news. But with Melian’s flight the enchanted borders of Doriath failed, and from that day forth the kingdom was no longer proof against invaders.

The Thousand Caves themselves were despoiled by raiding parties from Ufedhin’s Dwarves, and the whole of the treasure of Nargothrond, the hoard of Glaurung claimed by Hurin as weregild, was loaded onto carts for transport back to the realms of Nogrod and Belegost.

At the Fords of Ascar, where the ways to the two Dwarven kingdoms diverged, the clans halted their journey, and fell into dispute over the sharing of the treasure; and this was their downfall.

Beren came alone against the Dwarves. His onslaught was like in speed and strength to the leaping of a great fire amidst a pile of wood, for none could stand against him. The king of Nogrod fell in single combat with him at the Ford of Ascar, which was afterwards named in tongues of Men _Baening_ , the River of Bones; and his thanes fell likewise.

Last to fall was Ufedhin. Yet he fell not to Beren’s blade, but rather to a spear wielded by Luthien, who escaped from her captors in the carnage of Beren’s assault. She spat curses at him as she struck; she renounced their kinship with the mouth he and his Dwarven friends had filled with their piss and their come.

Then Ufedhin dying pushed himself up the haft of the spear, and with his mailed fist clutched the throat of his sister, and crushed her windpipe so that she could not breathe; and then he who had once been Daeron gave up the ghost.

In the midst of the slain Beren saw Luthien’s plight, and rushed to her; for he knew that without breath not Elf nor Man nor Dwarf could live.

Quickly he lit a fire, and heated his sword therein; and praying that his actions would be quick enough and his aim true, he plunged the glowing tip of the sword into Luthien’s throat.

Breath flooded into her lungs, and her power of speech departed for ever.

Luthien Tinuviel, delivered from death, kissed Beren her lover, and joyed in the feel of his flesh on her lips, and between her teeth, of enamel and of silver.

She fumbled blindly for the fastenings of his trousers, and soon enough she found herself in rapture, embraced by Beren’s silver hand, impaled upon his cock of gold.

 

Most of the treasure from Thingol’s hoard Beren threw into the Ascar with the bodies of the Dwarves, but the Nauglamir he kept; and it adorned the scarred throat of Luthien for many years.

In time, it passed to Dior, now Lord of Doriath; and the Wise deemed that Beren and Luthien had died indeed, and the Sons of Fëanor readied their arms to take the Silmaril from Doriath.

But in truth the death-day of Beren and Luthien is not known; and few among the Wise outside of Elrond’s kin have ever heard their tale as it is told aright.


	4. (postscript) the heart of the mountain

In the caverns deep within Angband, Morgoth brooded over the damage to his Iron Crown, and the asymmetry wrought by Beren and Luthien’s thievery.

He commissioned Gwindor, a skilled smith of the Noldor whom he captured during the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, to make a gem similar in all seeming to one of the missing Silmarils. This Gwindor did with such skill that the new gem could be told from the originals of Fëanor only by touch. For the true Silmarils were hot as the gledes of Aulë’s forge, and hard as the rocks of Taniquetil itself; but Gwindor’s invention was cool to the touch, and less proof, and would yield to a determined chisel wielded by skilled hands.

Morgoth was greatly pleased by this, for the single Silmaril left lopsided in his mutilated crown had galled him, as much as the thought of the theft committed in his very throne room. He demonstrated his pleasure by cutting off Gwindor’s right hand, so that the Elf might never make such a beautiful work again.

 

When the Silmarils, true and false, were taken from Morgoth’s crown at the end of the War of Wrath, Maedhros was first to take up the true gem in hand. It burned his one hand nearly to uselessness at a touch, and he dropped the gem in haste.

Then Maedhros despaired, knowing that the Silmarils rejected his claim on them. Maedhros wrapped one of the gems in a cloth of fustian, leaving the other for Maglor to do with as he would; and then Maedhros cast himself and the gem into a fiery pit.

But in his grief and wrath he had not realized the truth of the matter, and the gem he took with him as he died was the false Silmaril, not the true one that had burnt his hand.

 

For Maglor the remaining gem burned hotly in his hand, even through a cloth, and he knew it to be a Silmaril of old, whereas the other was not: but knowing its dark and troubled history, he cast it away into the Sea, deeming the Middle-earth was better rid of it.

As for the false Silmaril, many long years would pass before the Dwarves of Erebor recovered the gem, and, carving it into a new shape of many facets, in ignorance of its history named it the Arkenstone.

 

 

 

No epilogue, I pray you, for your play needs no excuse. Never excuse—for when the players are all dead, there needs none to be blamed. Marry, if he that writ it had played Pyramus and hanged himself in Thisbe’s garter, it would have been a fine tragedy. And so it is, truly, and very notably discharged. But come, your Bergomask. Let your epilogue alone.

\-- Shakespeare, _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ , Act V, Scene I

_Den heil'gen Speer -_  
_ich bring' ihn euch zurück! -_  
  
_Oh! Welchen Wunders höchstes Glück!_

\-- Wagner, _Parsifal_ , Act 3


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